different between petaflop vs petascale

English

Etymology

peta- +? flop

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /?p?t?fl?p/
• (US) IPA^(key): /?p?t?fl?p/

Noun

petaflop (plural petaflops)

1. (computing) Either of two units of measure of the calculating speed of a computer:
   1. a quadrillion (10¹?) floating point operations per second.
      • 1992 March 2, Richard Preston, The New Yorker, "The Mountains of Pi":

        ...a better machine is a petaflop machine. A petaflop is a quadrillion flops, a quadrillion floating-point operations per second, so a petaflop machine is a thousand times as fast as a teraflop machine, or a million times as fast as a Cray Y-MP8. The petaflop machine will exist by the year 2000, or soon afterward.

   2. 1,125,899,906,842,624 (2??) floating point operations per second.
      • 2012 Fall, Edgar Gabriel, COSC 6374 — Parallel Computation: Introduction and Organizational Issues, slide 20: “IBM Roadrunner”:

        First computer to surpass the 1 Petaflop (2?? FLOPS) barrier [in 2008]

English

Etymology

peta- +? scale

Adjective

petascale (not comparable)

1. A metric for objects on the scale of quadrillions (10¹⁵ or 1,000,000,000,000,000) of elements. Most often used for computer systems; a petascale computer system operates at speeds measured in petaflops and has memory measured in petabytes.

Coordinate terms

• gigascale
• terascale

References

• Scalable System Software for Petascale Computer Systems
• U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Genomics glossary

Anagrams

• Cape teals